The Dream Thief (16 page)

“This one pleases me.”

It was a chunk of dull yellow,
chipped and glassy. Even the seamstress lifted a brow.

“Madame does not want the
diamond?”

“No, I think not. We’ll take
this.”

It was presented to her wrapped
in tissue, along with a series of boxes for the gowns and undergarments, the
seamstress clucking under her breath all the while. Zane carried the lot of it
back to their carriage. He waited until they were both inside before flicking
open the tissue to examine the yellow stone.

“What was amiss with the diamond?
I could have bargained her down to a song.”

“Well good it would have done
you. The thing was paste.”

“Ah.”
His lips curved. He tipped the stone to his palm. “And what, if I may ask, is
this?”

“It is a sapphire,” Lia said. She
took it from him and blew on it, then held it up to the window, to the flare of
the sun that spilled through the glass. She glanced back at Zane.

“Yes?”

“Never
mind.”

With
the light streaming into it, the chunk of sapphire took on the exact wolf tint
of his eyes.

The
carriage bumped and rolled. They plunged into shadow again.

“Lia,” he said, abrupt. “What
will happen to you when we get back to Darkfrith? What will the council do to
you for running away?”

“Nothing,”
she lied. “Or perhaps a very small something. Confinement for a month.
Blindfolds, bread and water—I’m jesting. I’m the daughter of the Alpha. Once I
explain why I did it, everyone will understand.”

His
brows lowered into a frown, his gaze brooding. She couldn’t tell if he believed
her or not.

“Thank you,” she said, to
distract him. “Thank you for—well, for everything.”

It worked. He shrugged and turned
to look out the window, following the buildings they passed. Lia curled her
fingers around the sapphire, content to watch his face in the dark and shifting
light.

CHAPTER EIGHT

O
nce there was a princess.

She was very fair indeed, no
doubt the fairest princess of any princess who had ever been or ever would be.
For she was not merely a princess but an actual dragon in disguise, and that
meant she was beyond beauty: she had eyes that glowed and skin like a moonlit
rainbow. When she spoke, the rivers paused to listen, and when she moved, the
ground yielded beneath her feet in reverence to her greater glory.

She heard the minerals that sang
beneath the mountains, pockets of diamonds, heavy veins of gold. She could
vanish into wisps and bound across the sky with wings and scales and
frightening beauty, because in her delicacy she represented the very finest of
her kind.

It is well known that the
drákon
are the most lovely of all creatures. Their bodies are sinuous and slick; their
eyes blaze and their claws are crystal daggers. They glint green and blue and
red and gold, all the colors of all the jewels. And since this medieval
princess was considered the best of even these beings—her walk, her face, the
grace of her hips and legs and her slender, clever fingers—she was prized above
all things.

Dragon-men from the four corners
of the sky came to woo her. Human men laid flowers where she walked, and spoke
of the music of her voice, or the color of her hair, or how her eyes would
pierce their souls with a single, indifferent glance, draining their hopes and
dreams.

It was not her fault she was like
this. It was only who she was born to be: the precise, absolute pinnacle of her
kind. She was a treasure, guarded in a mighty castle perched high in the
Carpathian peaks, betrothed to a dragon-prince. Her life was a glimmer of
gemstones and alchemy. Her future was writ in stone. She would marry and breed
and bear superb children, and the
drákon
would reign for a thousand,
thousand years above the earth.

If only that peasant boy hadn’t
shown up. If only he hadn’t dared to seize what was not his own.

So:

Once there was a princess.

And once there was a lowly serf.

Their futures were about to
clash. Destiny would shudder. Silver stars would fall. But nothing was going to
stop that boy from stealing what he desired.

He was a real bastard, if you
think about it.

CHAPTER NINE

F
or the next three days, the
weather held. Zane was glad of it—far more than glad. The sky burned blue and
the wind blew mild, so he was able to remain outside the carriage. Away from
Lia. If the Roma thought it odd that his English passenger did not wish to
travel in secluded luxury beside his wife, he kept his own counsel. For three
days Zane sat with the coachman, letting the sun sink into his bones, watching
sunflower fields and meadows and darksome forests clip by.

And for three nights, they’d
found refuge in inns, happily off-season inns. Every one of them had two rooms
to spare.

The meadows slowly folded up into
hills. Every evening he would sit with Lia and discuss the next day ’s route;
he could hardly ask her much else, not in the cramped, public rooms they found.
She was usually quiet, which he supposed was natural to her. Of all Rue’s
children, he remembered that Amalia was the still one, always lingering alone
behind her siblings when he saw her…laughing with them when roused, teasing
with them when prodded, but somehow distant. Apart.

Brown-eyed, golden-haired; a
skinny little daisy amid all the pretty gardens of dragon-children. Aye, he
remembered her reticence.

But it left him to fill in the
conversation, something Zane had never learned to enjoy. Before Rue had stepped
into his life and steeled his manners into something approaching civilized,
he’d used conversation the same way he’d used his picks—for skill, for information,
and that was it. Social chatter was for nobs who didn’t have to work. And Zane,
one way or another, was always working.

So suppers in the countryside
became the two of them dining in silence, with peasants in homespun offering
stews and fried pork and steaming boiled cabbage, and Zane covertly following
the play of firelight over Lia’s face. Or the way her lips moved. Or how her
coiffure never seemed completely tamed, but somehow always perfect, with
wayward strands that curled against her neck and shoulders just like from a
portrait painting, no matter how tightly she pinned the rest.

Country inns were drafty places.
Someone would open a door, someone would unhinge a window, and the strands
would lift and he’d find himself adrift in her scent, in cool winter roses, a
fragrance subtle enough to raise the hairs on the back of his arms and sweet
enough to drown out the stink of the cabbage.

She no longer wore hair powder.
She hadn’t even bought any back in Jászberény with the rest of her toiletries;
he almost wished he didn’t know why.

But he did.

In a way the past three days had
been a comfortable dream, because even though the sun shone warm and the
pastures were picturesque, and no one followed them—another reason to ride
above— deep in his gut Zane knew it couldn’t last. Dame Fortune was never so
accommodating as that.

He was a mongrel masquerading as
a gentleman. Lia was a myth masquerading as a lady. Impossible as it seemed,
he’d bet his arse someone knew where—or what—one or both of them truly were.
And what they were doing here.

As they set out that fourth
morning, winding deeper and deeper into the rising green hills that led into
Transylvania, with the clouds behind them spreading thin and sparkling, Zane
couldn’t shake the feeling that this day—this cold, crystalline day—was going
to be the end of their fair streak of luck.

Damned if he wasn’t right.

She was sick of riding inside the
carriage. She was sick of the carriage itself. She was sick of the constant
swaying, and of the horses curling their lips in fear when they saw her, and of
the coachman smirking at her, and of Zane avoiding her eyes all the time, and
of the bloody,
bloody
diamond singing to her across the heavens in a
symphony that was
not
getting any softer the nearer they got. Lia
pressed her fingers to her temples and sighed. She wasn’t sleeping again. Like
the call of
Draumr,
the dreams were getting stronger. Sounds. Scents.
His lips, his hands, stroking her body every night, kisses and whispers and
she’d wake in a panic, thinking it was real. That it was already real.

But she still slept alone. How
much longer, she couldn’t say. The future was looming, and she had yet to
figure a way to avoid it.

She was going to be his lover. It
might as well have been scrawled across the stars. In all the dreams, in all
their outcomes, that part was always the same. And once that happened, Amalia
knew the final threads of her safe, guarded existence would forever unravel.

The
drákon
mated for life.
She could not sleep with him and then just slip away; she could not use her own
body so lightly. Perhaps it was that there were so few of them left, but
mating—marriage—was taken with great gravity back in the shire. The young
children played games mocking love; as they grew older the games turned more
sensual, and more serious. By the time marriage vows were exchanged in
Darkfrith’s lone and white-marbled chapel, all games were done. Husband and
wife were sacred to her kind. No one divided them. No one even tried. To do so
would be to risk the punishment of the tribe: imprisonment. Even death.

She was born to a world of harsh,
shining rules. When she gave her body to Zane, she would be giving him her
heart. And so her life.

He would never wed her. She knew
from her dreams that wasn’t what he desired; his hopes and ambitions ran far
darker than that.

He craved power and luxury. He
craved possession, not love. In the blind future she would bring him riches and
pleasures he’d not yet imagined. She would steal and lie and twist fates for
him. And for a mortal man who could not truly open his heart, it would be
enough.

For a creature who had long ago
lost hers to him, it would be an abomination.

She was trapped. She was stuck
between worlds, too much a beast to become fully his, too much his to become
fully
drákon.

In Darkfrith she’d avoided the
places she knew her peers went for stolen moments. She’d removed herself as far
as possible from the hidden pockets of woods, and the old granary, the swimming
stream, and the secret cave by Blackstone Fell that wasn’t secret at all—not to
young couples. Even her brothers and sisters thought her painfully chaste.